WASHINGTON — That little know-it-all: part thinker, part statue of liberty.

She is as beloved as
The Thinker and the Statue of Liberty — and so French, so chic.

The National Gallery of Art has had
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, created by Edgar Degas between 1878 and 1881, on display as
part of its permanent collection since 2002.

It is the centerpiece of the gallery’s Degas holdings, among the world’s largest. But the
popular sculpture is about to get a bigger spotlight.

Capitalizing on the Kennedy Center musical
Little Dancer, which will open on Oct. 25 and is inspired by Degas and the teen model who
posed for him, the gallery has scheduled an exhibit highlighting the piece.

(After Degas’ death, additional bronze casts were made of
Little Dancer, one of which is owned by Leslie and Abigail Wexner and will be part of the
family art exhibit set to open Sept. 20 at the Wexner Center for the Arts.)

The National Gallery exhibit, on view Oct. 5 through Jan. 11, will include 11 additional
ballet-themed creations by Degas: sculptures, oils and works on paper. All are from the National
Gallery collections, with the exception of the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s
The Dance Class (Ecole de Danse), a bright, busy oil painting crowded with young women
preparing to rehearse. A couple of dancers descend into the studio on a spiral staircase that
Alfred Hitchcock would have loved.

The dark underworld of the Paris Opera Ballet intrigued Degas more than what was happening
onstage. In terms of artistry, he witnessed a low point in French dance, after the peak of
romanticism in the 1840s and before the Ballets Russes arrived in the early 1900s.

He ignored the stars and focused on the unknowns. He was intrigued by the moment of becoming, as
ancient Greek artists were fascinated by the unformed bodies of boy athletes that hinted at the
potential for greatness. (One of Degas’ earliest paintings is
Young Spartans Exercising, 1860.) Few artists before Degas paid any attention to the
petits rats, the term by which the youngest students of the French academy are still
known. They came from mostly poor families. They were pursued by patrons who didn’t have art on
their minds.

Did Degas have more than art on his mind?

If anything illicit went on between him and his young models — including Marie van Goethem, who
posed for
Little Dancer — he was discreet about it. No evidence has come to light, said Kimberly
Jones, the National Gallery’s associate curator of French paintings. That is telling, she
added.

“Artists are horrible gossips.”

The dancers’ life that Degas memorialized in hundreds of works was one of dedication and
passion. But it was also a life of drudgery and creepiness.

You needed a strong backbone to survive, and that is what he gave his
Little Dancer.

The artist known for capturing so many subjects in motion — dancers, horses, nudes — froze his
most famous work in upright stillness. He draws our eye to her firm spine by the way she throws her
shoulders back, clasping her hands behind her, lengthening her torso. This isn’t a dance position;
it’s a deviation, even a rebellion. She is opening and stretching her shoulders in a way that feels
good to a dancer seeking a moment’s freedom from the dictates of technique.

Like her, Degas deviated from dictates. For the only sculpture displayed in his lifetime, he
didn’t create a voluptuous figure in marble or bronze; he used beeswax over a steel armature to
mold a skinny child with a soft belly. He had a Parisian dollmaker craft her head of human hair and
her skirt of tulle and cotton netting.

In recent years, National Gallery of Art staff members have discovered through radiographs that
he filled her skeleton with random junk. He stuffed her arms with paintbrushes; a metal spring is
in her neck.

But is she truly still? The arms, hands and interlaced fingers are quiet. Look closely, though,
and you’ll see that her right pinkie is slightly lifted, caught mid-wiggle.

“She’s timeless,” said Daphne Barbour, a senior object conservator at the gallery.

“She is more than 100 years old, but she is absolutely identifiable to us.”